Intrada 
Lassú (Slow Dance) 
Lapockás tánc (Shoulder Blade Dance) 
Chorea hungaricae 
Ugrós (Leaping Dance) 
 

Ferenc Farkas studied with Leo Weiner at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest and later with Ottorino Respighi in Rome. On returning to Budapest in 1932, one of his first commissions was for a film score and he went on to compose extensively for film and theatre productions. At the same time, he began researching Hungarian folk music and began a distinguished teaching career: his pupils included Ligeti and Kurtág. 

This work, officially titled Antique Hungarian Dances from the 17th Century, exists in versions for various solo instruments and ensembles, with the present wind quintet version dating from 1959. In a note on the work, Farkas himself wrote that ‘compared with the rich folk-song heritage of Hungary, our ancient airs and dances that have been preserved in writing have a more modest role. For this work I have been influenced by dances of the 17th century, written by unknown amateurs in a relatively simple style … My interest in this music was first captured in the 1940s. I was so fascinated that I decided to give these melodies new life. I fitted the little dances together, in rondo form, and leaning on Baroque harmony and counterpoint, I attempted a reminiscence of that atmosphere of provincial Hungarian life at the time.’ 

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With the first performance of this Nonet in 1850, Louise Farrenc achieved her greatest success as a composer – so much so that as a result she was able demand (and to get) a teaching salary for her job at the Paris Conservatoire that was the same as that paid to her male colleagues – a remarkable coup in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The premiere took place on 19 March 1850 at the Salle Erard and the ensemble was led by a brilliant young prodigy: Joseph Joachim – still in his teens but already an artist who was in demand all over Europe. Coincidentally, the violin has some unusually florid moments in the Nonet, including a cadenza at the end of the first movement. More remarkable, though, is the skill with which Farrenc shares the musical argument throughout the instruments, though it’s not surprising when we note that she was an accomplished composer of orchestral works including three symphonies, the last of which had been played in Paris a year earlier, in 1849.

Given the quality and originality of this music, it’s puzzling that Farrenc is not better known. As well as having to battle with prejudice against her gender, she had another issue to face: for composers to enjoy really big success in nineteenth-century Paris they needed to write operas, and Farrenc’s interests lay entirely in instrumental music. Still, the Nonet was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm, though her music lapsed into obscurity after her death in 1875. In the last twenty years or so Farrenc has enjoyed a well-deserved revival, with recordings of all her major chamber and orchestral works.

The Nonet is in four movements and has the combination of melodic inventiveness and charm that music by lesser composers often lacks. With echoes of Beethoven, Schubert and Spohr, this is the work of a serious and gifted musician who has a genuinely individual style. The fluency with which the violin cadenza merges seamlessly into the end of the movement is a mark of this. The rather Schubertian opening to the slow movement reveals a superb melodist, and the plucked strings and spiky interjections at the start of the Scherzo – and the rampaging tune that eventually emerges – are vastly appealing and characterful. After a slow introduction, the finale feels easy-going but makes considerable demands on the players.

Nigel Simeone

Allegro
Andante sostenuto
Allegro vivace

The composer of three symphonies and an impressive body of chamber music as well as an extensive catalogue of works for piano (her own instrument), Louise Farrenc has thankfully been rediscovered after a century of neglect. Born Jeanne-Louise Dumont, she came from an artistic family and was encouraged to develop her gifts as a pianist and composer. She studied the piano with Moscheles and Hummel, and her composition teacher was Anton Reicha. In 1821 she married the flautist Aristide Farrenc who subsequently established a publishing business. After a successful career as a travelling virtuoso, Louise Farrenc was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842, a post she held for thirty years. The Sextet for piano and wind quintet was written in 1851–2, immediately after the successful premiere of her Nonet for strings and wind (in which Joseph Joachim was one of the performers).

The first movement – the longest of the three – opens with a dramatic theme, decorated by elaborate piano writing, while the second theme is more lyrical. Broadly-conceived, this movement ends in grand style. The main theme of the slow movement is introduced by the wind alone before the being taken up by the piano, then by the whole ensemble with several short wind solos. The finale begins with an urgent and uneasy theme on the piano which gives way to a delicate second idea. But dramatic intensity is maintained throughout the movement, right up to the turbulent ending.

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Kyrie (Messager) 
Gloria (Fauré) 
Sanctus (Fauré) 
O salutaris (Messager) 
Agnus Dei (Fauré) 
 

In August 1881, Fauré and Messager were staying with their friends, Camille and Marie Clerc at their summer home in the fishing village of Villerville, on the Normandy coast between Trouville and Honfleur. They had the idea of composing a collaborative Mass to be sung by the women and girls of the village, joined by those on holiday there, for an event to benefit the local fishermen. Preceded by a procession through the village by the fishermen themselves, the first performance was given at the Parish Mass on 3 September 1881 in Villerville’s twelfth-century church with accompaniment for harmonium and violin. A year later Fauré and Messager were again staying with the Clercs and decided to expand the instrumentation for flute, oboe, clarinet, strings and harmonium or organ. Fauré orchestrated the Agnus Dei and Messager took care of the rest and a second performance, using the new version, was given on 10 September 1882. The Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux has described the work as ‘a little holiday mass’, its music ‘so limpid and so lyrical … delicate, melodious and gentle’. The manuscript remained in the possession of the Clerc family for many years. In 1906, Fauré prepared his Messe basse which used some material from the work, but the original Fauré–Messager Mass was revived in 1980. In 1985, the descendants of the Clerc family donated the manuscript of the Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and this enchanting work was eventually published in 2000.  

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The Cantique de Jean Racine was performed at one of the celebrated series of chamber music concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique: on 15 May 1875 it was conducted by the work’s dedicatee, César Franck. Fauré had originally composed it in 1865 for a graduation prize at the École Niedermeyer, where he had studied composition with Saint-Saëns. It won the first prize, showing a young composer of winning melodic gifts. The text is Racine’s French paraphrase of a Latin hymn that ends – very aptly – by asking Christ to look kindly on the songs offered to His glory.

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Originally written as the slow movement of a planned cello sonata, the Élégie was first performed privately at the home of Fauré’s teacher and friend Saint-Saëns in June 1880. After abandoning the sonata (Fauré’s two cello sonatas – both magnificent works – came much later in his career), he decided to publish the Élégie as a stand-alone movement in 1883. It was dedicated to Jules Loeb who gave the first public performance, with Fauré at the piano, in a concert of the Société nationale de musique on 15 December 1883. The outer sections have a quiet solemnity which is underlined by the repeated piano chords heard at the start, over which the cello plays a melody seemingly laden with grief. The central section sees a move to a major key, and the arrival of a glorious lyrical theme – first on the piano, then the cello – which works up to a dramatic climax before a return to the sombre mood of the opening.  

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La bonne chanson was the most ambitious of Fauré’s settings of Verlaine’s poetry. The first eight songs were completed in 1893 but the ninth was only added in February 1894. A true cycle, La bonne chanson has several recurring themes which bring musical unity to the whole structure. According to the Fauré scholar Jean-Michel Nectoux, the result is ‘far more than just a volume of songs. It reaches the proportions almost of a vocal symphony.’ The inspiration for the work was the singer Emma Bardac, with whom Fauré became infatuated in the early 1890s. She gave Fauré advice about revisions while he was working on the songs, and sang them in private at her home in Bougival, with the composer at the piano. La bonne chanson was first given in a concert by the tenor Maurice Bagès on 25 April 1894. Bagès also gave the first London performance on 1 April 1898 (at Frank Schuster’s home in Old Queen Street) and it was for this occasion that Fauré made the version for piano and string quintet (though he later wondered if this arrangement was ‘unnecessary’, it has a tone colour all its own, quite distinct from the solo piano version). Reactions to the new cycle were mixed: Marcel Proust was enchanted by it, writing that ‘I adore this collection’, but he noted that Debussy (who later married Emma Bardac) thought it was ‘too complicated.’ History has come down firmly on Proust’s side: La bonne chanson is recognised as one of Fauré’s greatest achievements, combining sophisticated musical design with lyrical inspiration.  

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Gabriel Fauré composed thirteen nocturnes for piano between 1875 and 1921. The last of them, No.13 in B minor, Op.119, was completed on 31 December 1921, two weeks after the death of his friend Saint-Saëns. This event may have influenced the noble and introspective mood of the work, much of which seems to inhabit a world of private meditation, though it rises to a climax of great intensity before a return of the opening material. This substantial work moves through passion, anger, consolation, and grief, finally reaching what the British musicologist Robert Orledge described as ‘a visionary coda’ which gradually sinks into silence. 

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Fauré’s glorious First Piano Quartet was composed over a four-year period (1876–79) and was given its premiere at the Société Nationale de Musique in February 1880. In 1883 Fauré revised the last movement, and it is in this version that the work was published. It is dedicated to the Belgian violinist Hubert Léonard (1819–1890). The first movement opens with a stirring unison string theme punctuated by syncopated piano chords, contrasted with a more lyrical second idea. The Scherzo begins with pizzicato chords over which the piano traces a melody of sparkling delicacy. Roles are reversed in the Trio section – the piano supplying the accompaniment to a theme of ravishing beauty and refinement presented by the strings. The slow movement was said by Fauré himself to be a lament for the sudden ending of his engagement to Marianne Viardot (one of Pauline Viardot’s daughters) – expressed through music of eloquent, passionate restraint. The finale is both exciting (with the dotted rhythms of the opening theme) and radiant (the arching second theme), crowned by a conclusion of unquenchable ardour.

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Molto moderato
Adagio
Allegretto moderato

No other work by Fauré gave his as much trouble as the First Piano Quintet. The earliest sketches date from 1887 (in the same sketch-book as the ‘Pie Jesu’ from the Requiem), the bulk of the composition was done between 1890 and 1894, and the work was completed and revised in 1903–5. When it was published in 1907, it was not in Paris, but in New York, issued by G. Schirmer. The first performance was given on 23 March 1906 when Fauré himself and a quartet led by Eugène Ysaÿe (the work’s dedicatee) played it in Brussels at the home of Octave Maus. A week later (30 March) they gave it at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

One early enthusiast for the work was the young Aaron Copland. In the early 1920s he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger – a Fauré pupil – and it was through her that Copland came to love this music. In 1924, he published an article in Musical Quarterly entitled ‘Gabriel Fauré: a neglected master’, likening Fauré to Brahms, with ‘a genius as great, a style as individual and a technique as perfect’. Copland described the first movement of the quintet: ‘The initial theme is an excellent example of that continuity of line that [is] peculiar to Faure’s late manner. A short subsidiary theme for strings alone, which later plays so important a part in the development, brings us to the second idea – an ardent, yearning phrase which must convince the most recalcitrant ear of Faure’s great powers of melody-making. Note with what technical mastery the recapitulation is made the inevitable climax of the development and is so varied as to take away all feeling of repetition.’ The extended Adagio – melancholy and introspective – is followed by a last movement that Copland described as ‘a sort of combination Scherzo–Finale’.

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1. Allegro ma non troppo
2. Andantino
3. Allegro vivo

Fauré retired as Director of the Paris Conservatoire in 1920, at the age of 75. Though he was increasingly troubled by a kind of deafness that distorted musical sounds, he produced several late works that demonstrate a wonderful economy and concentration: the Second Piano Quintet, Second Cello Sonata and the song cycle L’Horizon chimérique were completed in 1921, and his only String Quartet was to occupy him from 1923 until just before he died the following year. The Piano Trio was started in his favourite retreat of Annecy-le-Vieux in August 1922 and his original idea was to write it for clarinet, cello and piano but he soon settled on having a violin as the top part. Progress was slow. Fauré wrote to his wife: ‘I can’t work for long stretches of time. My worst problem is perpetual tiredness.’ There’s no sense of fatigue in this work, partly because Fauré took his time. The slow movement was the first to be completed, and the outer movements of the Trio were finished by February 1923. The first performance was given on 12 May 1923 at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique by Fauré was too ill to attend. He did hear a performance the following year given by the celebrated trio of Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals. The music demonstrates Fauré at his most subtle harmonically and rhythmically in the first movement, at his most elegantly restrained in the slow movement, and at his most vigorous in the finale (the resemblance between its main theme and ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Pagliacci – an opera Fauré particularly disliked – was, according to Fauré himself, entirely accidental).

Nigel Simeone

Allegro moderato 
Andante 
Allegro 
 

Fauré’s String Quartet was his last composition, completed in 1924 shortly before his death. It was also his first chamber work without piano. For the first movement he drew on ideas composed 45 years earlier for his Violin Concerto, but now reworked in a much more compact and tightly organised sonata form structure. The Andante was written first, in September 1923 at Annecy. The opening Allegro moderato was completed in Paris and the third movement (combining elements of scherzo and finale) was finished in 1924, back in Annecy. The result is a work of great expressive power, with, as the British musicologist Robert Orledge has noted, ‘the craftsmanship being so consummate that we need to listen hard even to notice the joins or the thematic counterpoint that gives the Quartet its virile strength.’ On 12 September 1924, Fauré wrote to his wife from Annecy announcing that ‘yesterday evening I finished the finale. So that’s the quartet finished’. A month later, weakened by a bout of pneumonia, Fauré returned to Paris where he died peacefully early in the morning of 4 November. Two days later, the composer Albert Roussel wrote a moving tribute in the magazine Comoedia: Fauré ‘occupied a place apart in the history of music and, without noise or fuss or meaningless gesture, he pointed the way towards marvellous horizons overflowing with freshness and light.’ 

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Fauré worked on a violin concerto in 1878–9, but the project was destined to remain unfinished. Though the first two movements were performed by the violinist Ovide Musin and the Colonne Orchestra on 12 April 1880, the finale was never written. The slow movement of the concerto was destroyed, but was probably reworked as the Andante for violin and piano Op.75. The first movement – lyrical and expansive – survived complete, and turned out to be a surprisingly fruitful source for the composer: Fauré’s biographer Robert Orledge noted that its two main themes ‘proved far better suited to the more intimate medium of the String Quartet’ when they were reused ‘in the light of a lifetime’s experience’ in his last work, written in 1923–4. 

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Gerald Finzi began work on this piece in 1932 but only completed it four years later, in 1936. The first performance was given at the Wigmore Hall by Leon Goossens (to whom Finzi subsequently dedicated the work) and the Menges Quartet, on 24 March 1936. Finzi was particularly touched by Goossens’s enthusiasm for the piece, having been unsure if the great oboist would be interested in the work: a nervous composer wrote to his friend Howard Ferguson: “I see that Leon, the pride of oboeland, is playing with the Isolde Menges Quartet … Perhaps he’ll say that the Interlude isn’t big enough for him.”

He needn’t have worried, but this lovely work is just one of four published pieces of chamber music by Finzi.

Nigel Simeone © 2012

Mad Piper 
Carpathian 
Sad Piper 
Ursari 
 

Pavel Fischer was a founder member and leader of the Škampa Quartet and after an extremely successful performing career, has turned increasingly to teaching and composition. His String Quartet No.3 was written in 2011 and demonstrates his fascination with integrating elements of music from different parts of the world into his work. The ‘Mad Piper’ of the title (and the first movement), evokes the Canadian bagpiper Bill Millin who continued to play while under fire on Sword Beach during the initial stages of the D-Day Landings in 1944. 

After a fast, aggressive opening (the heat of battle, perhaps?), a plaintive viola melody leads to a reprise of the initial material, followed by a serene coda. The second movement, ‘Carpathian’, is a vigorous folk dance with an unceasing, breathless drive. The slow movement, ‘Sad Piper’, was inspired by the plaintive song of a Bulgarian piper, here transformed into an eloquent viola solo, supported by quiet sustained chords. The title of the finale, ‘Ursari’ recalls the nomadic Romani bear handlers of Eastern Europe, in particular their bear dances (Bartok also composed a ‘Bear Dance’ for piano which he later orchestrated). Here the quartet takes on the role of a percussion section as well as string instruments, the music driving forwards until a brief respite for a reflective passage before the dance is taken up again with renewed energy. 

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In a brief note on this work, Graham Fitkin writes that ‘this piece started from one thing – a trill. The alternation of two adjacent notes gives rise to a simple and constant grouping of beats. Place it in different temporal contexts and the inherent quality of the trill is questioned.’ These are the essential component parts of Gate, but what makes the piece so compelling is the vitality and creative imagination with which these ostensibly simple ideas are expanded and mutated in a piece that moves forward with seemingly unstoppable impetus to a dizzying close. 

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Recur was commissioned by Aberdeenshire’s SoundFestival and written for harpist Ruth Wall and the Sacconi Quartet who gave the first performance in Aberdeen in October 2016. In his own note on the work, Fitkin writes that ‘The piece revolves around one very simple rising melodic fragment. It is in C minor of all things. It reappears throughout the piece with varying degrees of similarity. Initially there is much use of the instruments’ plucking capabilities but as the piece progresses increasingly sustained notes are integrated. I think the character of the music shifts constantly, sometimes gently over a period of time but occasionally with more obvious sudden kicks. Ostensibly though, that initial idea seems to crack on through the piece regardless.’ In his review of the premiere, David Kettle in The Scotsman described Recur as ‘a gem of a piece, sparkling with plucked textures, its four-note earworm of a tune cast in endlessly inventive new contexts, funky and foot-tapping yet also full of piquant emotion.’ 

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Pambiche. Risoluto 
Baiao. Com morbidezza 
Mambo. Allegrissimo 
Samba lenta. Tranquillo 
Merengue. Vivo com spirito 
 

Jean Françaix’s Cinq danses exotiques were dedicated to the great French saxophonist Marcel Mule. While the music is Françaix’s own, the characteristic rhythms of all five dances draw on traditional music from Latin America. The first, a lively ‘Pambiche’, has its origins in the island nation of Dominica, while the second, a languid ‘Baiao’ is a popular form in north-eastern Brazil. The fast ‘Mambo’ has an obsessive repeating figure in the bass which drives the music along, while the Brazilian ‘Samba lenta’ is perhaps the most expressive of the set, its music in slow, swaying 5/8 time. The Merengue is a dance from the island of Hispaniola (comprising the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Françaix’s version is quick and highly syncopated. 

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Larghetto tranquillo – Allegro 
Andante 
Scherzando 
Allegro 
 

Jean Françaix came from a musical family and took up composing at the age of six. He became a favourite pupil of Nadia Boulanger, and his youthful gifts were also recognised by Ravel. During the 1930s, his output included chamber music, orchestral pieces, ballets, the opera Le diable boiteux and an oratorio, L’Apocalypse selon Saint Jean. After World War Two, Françaix continued to produce a stream of new works, including several film scores. His style remained neo-classical, usually marked by a lightness of touch and wit. 

The Dixtuor, for string quintet and wind quintet, is one of his last major works, the manuscript dated at the end 24 October 1986. It was a commission for the Cologne-based Linos Ensemble which gave the premiere in 1987. The Dixtuor opens with a long, gentle introduction which gives way to a vigorous Allegro. The lyrical Andante opens with a melody shared by oboe and clarinet (over strings) before the rest of the ensemble join gradually. Marked Scherzando, the third movement makes virtuoso demands on the players, but it is music of genuine charm, with a slow (and endearingly odd) central Trio section. The finale is a brisk Allegro.  

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Jean Françaix (1912–97) composed his Sonatine for the 1952 trumpet concours. Cast in three short movements, the opening ‘Prélude’ requires considerable agility while the ‘Sarabande’ presents a long, slow melody on a muted trumpet which gives way to faster and more complex section full of rapid chromatic writing. An unaccompanied cadenza leads directly to an entertaining ‘Gigue’ which brings the work to a high-spirited close.

Nigel Simeone © 2024 

César Franck (1822–1890) served as the organist of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris for over 30 years at the same time as composing utterly distinctive chamber music (Violin Sonata, Piano Quintet) and orchestral works (Symphony, Symphonic Variations). His music for organ is particularly significant and he composed his Three Chorales for organ in the last year of his life. The organist Dame Gillian Weir has described the Second Chorale as ‘a giant passacaglia, suggesting the tolling of a great bell as it moves from sombre genesis through an avalanche of sound to its peaceful end.’ 

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1. Molto moderato quasi lento
2. Lento, con molto sentimento
3. Allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco

Born in Liège (now in Belgium), César Franck first established his reputation in Paris as supremely gifted organist at the church of St, Clotilde, where he became famous for his improvisations, but as he grew older he became more innovative – and hugely influential – as a composer. Following his appointment as a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, his pupils included Chausson and Duparc, as well as organists such as Vierne. Unlike Saint-Saëns, Franck was not particularly prolific, but his three late chamber music masterpieces – the Violin Sonata, String Quartet and the present Quintet – demonstrate a composer of striking originality at the height of his powers. The Quintet was composed between Autumn 1878 and July 1879, and first performed at the concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique in Paris on 17 January 1880. It caused something of an uproar, with Franck’s pupils wildly enthusiastic, and other members of the audience stunned into silence. Fellow-composer Édouard Lalo described the Quintet as ‘an explosion’ – an apt description for what is certainly one of Franck’s most searing and emotional works. It wasn’t only the audience who were baffled. Franck has dedicated the piece to Saint-Saëns who played the piano at the premiere, but he was dismissive of it. In a particularly insulting gesture, he walked off stage at the end of the performance and left the manuscript that Franck had copied specially for him on the piano.

This expansive and grandly-conceived Piano Quintet is a fine example of Franck’s use of cyclic form, where themes are woven through all three movements. Unlike Brahms’s Piano Quintet (in the same key), Franck has no Scherzo, but moments such as the ostinato-driven start of the Finale ensure that there’s no shortage of urgency and fire in the work. At the close the work’s main motto theme returns in a triumphant transformation.

Nigel Simeone ©2014

 Published in 1868 as one of Franck’s 6 pièces d’orgue, the Prélude, fugue et variation was composed around 1860 and bears a dedication ‘à mon ami, Monsieur Camille Saint-Saëns’. The Prelude has strong echoes of Bach (as viewed through the prism of France in the nineteenth century), the flowing right-hand melody set against steady pedal notes. This is followed by a brief section marked Lento which leads to the fugue, in triple time. A held pedal note introduces the closing Variation, an elaboration of the opening Prelude, but now with a much more animated accompaniment. Franck also made an alternative arrangement of this work as a duet for piano and harmonium which he performed at a Société nationale concert with Vincent d’Indy.  

© Nigel Simeone